Thoroughly unpleasant and turgid to boot.
Rats and humans declare war on one another in this gory study in hidden fears and shifting loyalties.
Vaguely Victorian in setting, the narrative switches in short alternating chapters between human and rodent casts. Below ground, Blacker concocts an elaborately structured community of rats who somehow converse nonverbally by telepathic “revelation”; certain virginal bucks can even “hear” ambient information. Overhead, street child Dogboy gets by helping both a rat catcher who collects victims for slaughter in pit fights with dogs and also a crackpot scientist who, allied with an ambitious local politician, is engineering a campaign of fear to fuel large-scale massacres of the rat population. Along with adding a companion for Dogboy in Caz, a younger escapee from a “dance school” that trains girls as playthings for wealthy perverts, the author crafts ugly scenes of human brutality that give the rats—vicious or even cannibalistic as some may be—the moral high ground. Despite some humans whose sympathies lie with the rats, the sides are clearer than the plot, which climaxes in a muddled running battle that ends in a draw and is followed by a contrived happy ending. The fantasy elements do at least provide some distraction from the blunt lambasting of human savagery.
Thoroughly unpleasant and turgid to boot. (rat glossary) (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6902-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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